ANTIQUES

ANTIQUES; Discovered Along the Flowered-Silk Route

By PAULA DEITZ; Paula Deitz is co-editor of The Hudson Review.

Published: August 26, 1990

LONDON—
When it comes to antiques, whether they be furniture or textiles, their history bespeaks a world of fashion and a way of life that affected the owners as well as the makers. But rare is the exhibition of antiques that takes this factor into account; if an exhibition does, objects appreciated for their beauty alone can also tell a story of commerce.

Currently at the Victoria and Albert Museum (through Oct. 28), an exhibition called ''Flowered Silks: A Noble Manufacture of the 18th Century'' is not only a rich display surveying the height of the silk-weaving industry in England and France. Even more, it brings alive an entire period when high fashion was determined each new season by the pattern of the fabric worn rather than by the cut of the gown or waistcoat.

In 1757, Malachy Postlethwayt was the first to coin the descriptive subtitle of the show in his ''Dictionary of Trade and Commerce,'' and his definition, like the exhibition itself, covers the whole production of flowered silks, including nongeometric patterns, that were woven on drawlooms, often at the rate of only a yard a day.

Natalie Rothstein, who organized the exhibition, is the curator emeritus of textile furnishings and dress, but in reality she is a sleuth in the best British tradition. Like Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, she has relentlessly followed up one clue after another in merchants' order books and customs records. She then pieced together a collection of dresses, waistcoats, lengths of silk and paintings depicting them, with the original designs and pattern books.

For the last 34 years, Miss Rothstein has traveled what can only be described as the flowered-silk route, which began in Spitalfields, the East London neighborhood settled by French Huguenot weavers after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Later, it took her abroad to the prosperous cities of the American colonies and to the countries of Northern Europe and Scandinavia, where wealthy merchants providing timber and supplies to the British Navy could afford the luxuries of the woven-silk trade. This and other facts about the silk trade will be in her book entitlted ''Silk Designs of the 18th Century,'' to be published by Thames and Hudson this fall.

Only this year, the earliest known piece of English silk was rediscovered in an Australian museum by a London antiques dealer in time to be in the opening section of the show on bizarre silk designs. Refreshingly modern, almost Art Deco in feeling, these motifs draw heavily on chinoiserie and Japanese lacquer work.

They include fantasy garden pavilions and fountains and real and abstract floral and leaf patterns in a dense design and bold colors enhanced by metallic threads. The oldest panel of silk, designed by James Leman in 1710, is placed next to the original pattern, already in the Victoria and Albert collection. The latter's brighter colors served the weaver only as a marker for the gold and silver and more muted colors of the original silk. Frequently, the quickly out-of-fashion dresses made from these fabrics ended up as chasubles or tunics for priests.

In the symmetrical patterns of the 1720's, the silks had a running design more like lace, which reached a zenith in the frothy gold canopy for the coronation of George II in 1727, also designed by Leman. In an abstract feathery design, the gold ground is decorated with a scattering of red, blue and white flowers with short green stems.

As flowers became more common in the patterns of the 1730's, they were also worked to give them a three-dimensional look by using tones of one color as a kind of shading. Jean Revel of Lyon dovetailed tones of color in a method called points rentres, which was taken up by the English designer Anna Maria Garthwaite. These large-scale floral designs were probably the first to exemplify the typical English cabbage-size rose.

Miss Garthwaite, a parson's daughter from Lincolnshire, settled in a corner house with her widowed sister on what was then Princes Street in Spitalfields and from 1720 to 1750 designed more than a thousand silk patterns to be sold to master weavers and mercers. Since pattern was what determined style, she was in a sense the Coco Chanel of her time, though her name is curiously absent from contemporary correspondence and diaries. That one of her designs is dated Christmas Eve 1744 may mean she rarely took a night off.

During the 1740's, the Garthwaite designs - her name became a kind of trademark - developed into the quintessential English pattern that one associates with Spitalfields silks. Onto a ground of off-white silk, sometimes with a small design in the ground color, were brocaded sprays of naturalistic flowers on trailing vines and stems as if one had just cut them in the garden and strewn them about. Lilies, bindweed and daisies in their true colors with leaves and tendrils in rococo patterns had a freshness that was luxuriously regal. Unlike French designs, the repeat was very large, sometimes over a yard.

Some of the designers were also naturalists or botanists, and according to Miss Rothstein, a few of the plants are varieties documented as having been introduced only recently from abroad.

If one was a wealthy merchant's daughter in 1742, even in upstate New York, it was de rigueur to have a Spitalfields brocaded taffeta dress in one of these patterns. Miss Rothstein discovered one in Albany that was worn by Catherine Livingston at the time when Indian trading posts were but a few miles away. Eventually, the original fabric pattern by Miss Garthwaite also turned up, and her notes on it indicate that in 1742 it was passed on to a Mr. Pully, a weaver. One of Miss Livingston's relatives is quoted as having written at that time about Albany: ''People are more nice here than in Boston.''

In Boston, fashionable ladies may have been as elegant but were less daring with color because of the Puritan tradition. A Miss Winslow's ice-blue damask dress in a Garthwaite pattern was also made in red for the Scottish market, and in New Hampshire, the pattern for Ruth Eliot's 1751 coffee-colored Garthwaite damask was also used for a man's scarlet dressing gown in Oslo. Even though the American colonists were more subdued, a 1746 portrait by Robert Feke of Mrs. Charles Willing of Philadelphia in gray silk damask shows a woman brimming with pride in her new dress - and again the rediscovered pattern indicates just how new it was.

With the introduction of the neo-classical mode, eventually the English and finally the French styles of flowered silks were eclipsed by softer fabrics and printed cottons; yet, many of the original dresses were remade to be worn at the end of the century with fancy straw hats, and they survive today to be cherished by collectors and for study purposes. When dresses become threadbare, the valuable fabric is cut into panels to be preserved, away from light and humidity.

In London, the Antique Textile Company, at 100 Portland Road, has a museum-quality example of an 18th-century brocaded silk dress with a design of peacock feathers and quaking grass ($8,000). The shop also offers lengths of silk from the 1740's with floral sprays or vases of flowers ($350 to $500) and a panel of damask silk with baskets of flowers overlaid by red and yellow blooms ($350).

In Manhattan, Cora Ginsburg at 19 East 74th Street, also has a selection of silk lengths that demonstrates the various styles of English design ($600 to $900), and a chartreuse silk dress with a brocaded design of oak leaves and flowers in mauve, rust and blue ($3,500) as well as one in a solid beige damask ($5,000).

Photo: An 18th-century satin dress, at the Victoria and Albert Museum (Victoria and Albert Museum)